NYU’s Massive Expansion Makes Enemies

NYU says the planned building, at center of rendering above, would relate to current towers.

Is Greenwich Village big enough for both a rapidly expanding New York University and the tens of thousands of non-students who call the iconic neighborhood home?

In a provocative feature story released Monday, New York magazine looks at the entrenched battle lines over the university’s ambitions to add some six million square feet of classroom, dormitory, office and hotel space by 2031. Half of the proposed expansion — or, as the magazine puts it, the equivalent of three Javits Centers — is slated to land within Greenwich Village.

The fact that NYU’s growth has irritated its neighbors is hardly news. But the magazine does an admirable job of putting the seemingly endless antagonism between the school and its neighbors into perspective. Led by John Sexton, NYU’s dynamic president, the university and its allies frame their interests as aligned with the economic best interests of New York City — and it’s not a difficult case to make. But it’s also not hard to imagine why quotes like this might irritate Village denizens who feel they’ve been overrun by binge-drinking hordes:

“Having 40,000 students is like having year-round tourists,” says Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at NYU. “They spend their parents’ money and don’t consume too much of public service and add to the nightlife.”

The magazine piece picks at some of the rawest wounds in the relationship between NYU and its neighbors over the school’s push to go vertical in a famously low-slung district.

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